Do Not Feed the Monkeys

This is a game of a single trick. Don't take me wrong - this is no simple trick, and yet it is the trick that has been perfected by the social media of today - FOMO. Fear of missing out, as in the state of anxiety induced by the thought of us missing something important, is the running force of this game - and it's perfect. For a time.

Gameplay is divided into two main modules. You have to navigate between your monitoring app learning as much as possible about your surveyed subjects, and your in-game apartment, where you have to maintain your physical condition and earn money to keep on going with your virtual life. The combination plays perfect, forcing you to constantly manage between the fear of missing something important on your computer screen happening, and your body begging you for attention.

It's not always that learning the inner workings of a machine spoils the fun. No matter how many times I see the film crew playing around with the plastic Xenomorph doll, the moment it burst out from the crewman's chest still hits the same. Here, on the other hand, the moment you break free from the illusion is the moment game turns into something else - and the something else just did not have the magic the first run had for me.

The problem of course, is that you are not actually surveying anything. I don't mean that in the obvious sense, that is that the places and people you see are not real. What I mean, is that the most important component is missing - there is absolutely no simulation of whatever is happening in the surveyed people lives whatsoever. What you see on the camera screens are short theatre plays - every day, at exactly the same hour, people gather in front of the camera and say their lines, and then disappear into the void again, not to be seen again until the exact hour they are set to appear. The first frantic hours of unbridled FOMO are replaced by excelesque time planning - "Oh, the scene here will start playing at 3 am, meaning I can easily sleep for 4 hours now, and then go to work". You are not a Peeping Tom anymore, absolutely consumed by lives of other people - you are a manager of your in-game body, with absolutely nothing at stake anymore. Even missing a cutscene is (in most cases) not even a big deal, because they start looping very quickly.

What we have here is actually two games in one. First game is a masterful deconstruction of modern-day surveillance society - that is a panopticon where thousands of FOMO watchmen constantly monitor social media feeds to catch every glimpse of life of the Other. The second game is a mildly interesting adventure / resource management game - which can be broken very quickly by understanding that all you see are scheduled events, and then learning the timetables of the surveyed characters. Problem is made even worse by the structure of the game, which encourages several replays - meaning that, sooner or later, you will see exactly the same things happening again, with you already knowing the timetable and all the plot twists - further making the screens feel like little camera obscuras set up for your enjoyment, rather than little windows into another lives.

I sincerely wish I could have more of the first game. I'll be honest - I have no idea how, from a gamedev point of view, it would be possible to extend the illusion. However, I do hope that next games from this devteam can play more into this concept - there is something special here, and it's definitely worth experiencing.